What You Need To Know To Sell Downloadable Products Online

Hmm...Most people would think that selling digital products online is
complicated. Well , it does take work to get your products prepared,
but selling itself can be fairly straightforward. In this brief
article I outline a poor-man's approach / less costly plus recommend several
professional products that provide for digital download.

If you're selling digital (that is, downloadable) products, such
as software, e-books, photos, music, and videos, you have several
options.


Less Costly Approach to Digital Sales

If you want to sell digital products online with practically no
up-front costs besides a regular website, this approach will work:

1. Set up a password protected directory on your site. If you
don't know how, check with your hosting service. Nearly all hosts
allow this.

2. Give this directory a name made up of seemingly random numbers
and letters, such as /b596798x22

3. Invent a username and password for this directory made of a
jumble of letters and numbers also, such as username: 4339278x,
password: t220792. Be aware that a numeral one (1) could be
mistaken for a lower-case "L".

4. Upload your digital content and give it a meaningful name
followed by 4 or 5 jumbled letters and numbers, such as
highlights070x1.pdf or dreamtide99s4.mp3.

5. Use PayPal "Website Payments Standard" to receive payments,
with a "Buy Now" button for each product according to the
instructions on the site.

6. When you receive an e-mail from PayPal indicating that payment
has been made, immediately send the purchaser a pre-prepared e-
mail containing the URL on your website, the username and
password, and a request not to pass the information on.

The idea of the random letters and numbers is to (a) give an
illusion of a unique, machine-generated URL and (b) to make it
difficult to guess the filename of additional products you have in
that directory.

I can hear you ranting, "You idiot! People will send your URL to
all their friends. You'll be a victim of fraud." My response is
this: Perhaps a few purchasers will do this, but if you ask them
not to, it'll happen very rarely. Change your directory name
occasionally. And if you get an unauthorized download here and
there, what have they stolen? A few electrons. People who steal
seldom make likely candidates to purchase your products anyway.
Unless your product is wildly popular, you would not lose many sales
due to fraud.

This approach isn't the best, of course. It won't work well for
high volumes and doesn't provide instant downloads for your
customers. But it will do to get you started -- and the price is
right. I use it as a back-up to more secure approaches.


Some Professional Digital Download Systems

The best systems generate a unique download URL for each purchaser
that times out in a few days or after a certain number of download
attempts . These are some systems I like:

* PayLoadz works with PayPal only and charges a flat monthly rate.
It includes a moderate-size, built-in affiliate network and
optional placement in the PayLoadz store. It is eBay compatible.
www.wilsonweb.com/afd/payloadz.htm

* 1ShoppingCart includes a newsletter program, autoresponder, ad
tracker, affiliate program, digital download, and a shopping cart
for a flat monthly rate. If you don't use PayPal as your system,
you'll also need a payment gateway and merchant account to take
credit cards. www.wilsonweb.com/afd/1shoppingcart.htm

* ClickBank is very popular and includes a large, built-in
affiliate network. It costs $49.95 set-up and 7.5% plus $1
transaction fee per sale. It includes a payment system.
www.clickbank.com

* ShopSite Pro is a full-featured small business shopping cart and
catalog building program that I've used since 1997. It has a
strong digital delivery feature, plus lots of flexibility for
selling tangible products. Unless you use PayPal or Google
Checkout, you'll need a payment gateway and a merchant account to
take credit cards. www.wilsonweb.com/afd/lexiconn.htm

There are many other very good systems. Don't limit yourself to
these mentioned above.

PayPal now has a micropayment system for transactions under $2
USD. Fees are 5% + 5¢ transaction fee. This makes it cost-
effective to sell mp3 files of your music for 99¢ or provide
access to low-cost documents for $2 -- and still make money.
Hooked together with PayLoadz for digital delivery, this could be
a money-maker for certain kinds of businesses.